- Directed by David Cronenberg
- Written by David Cronenberg
- Stars Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3LhCyoJs3E
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s weird and combines the erotic with horror. Some of the effects are pretty dated looking, but overall it was entertaining and still worth the watch.
Synopsis
We begin with a commercial for Starliner Apartments, a new high-rise development near Montreal. They have a golf course and pool; every apartment has cable TV on this little island paradise.
A young couple, the Svibens, comes to see an apartment while an older man beats up a young girl upstairs. The old man chokes the girl and then takes her clothes off. He cuts her open with a knife and pours in some acid. Then he cuts his own throat and dies.
Elsewhere, Nick Tudor has weird pains in his belly. Nick tells his wife that he’s going to work but instead goes to the top floor of the building, where he opens the door to Annabelle’s place. He finds the dead bodies of the girl and the old man inside. Then Nick goes to work.
Dr. Roger St. Luc, the building’s doctor, is called to the penthouse by the police to look at the bodies. Roger says he’s the one who found the bodies. The dead man, Dr. Hobbes, was one of Roger’s instructors at medical school, and he called Roger this morning to go to lunch.
Roger goes to see Dr. Hobbes’s partner, Rollo Linsky, who says they are working on a new kind of organ transplant using a “useful parasite” that can take over a human organ’s function. Rollo asks Roger to join him on the project.
Nick’s secretary finds him in his office drooling blood; There’s clearly something seriously wrong with him, but he says he’s fine. He’ll just go home. Nick’s wife Janine worries about Nick’s pains, and her friend Betts advises her to go see Dr. Roger St. Luc downstairs. Nick comes home from work early, has a seizure on the floor, and pukes in the bathtub. He next goes outside onto the balcony and pukes blood on some old people below. Luckily she had an umbrella.
A woman enters the basement laundry room, and there’s blood coming out of one of the ventilation shafts. When she opens one of the washing machines, something jumps out and kills her. It looks like a tongue. That wasn’t blood; it was some kind of trail.
An old man comes to see Roger as a patient and has strange belly pains too. He has a connection to the young woman who was murdered earlier.
Janine comes home from Betts’s place and finds Nick passed out by the refrigerator. There’s one of those bloody trails there too. He refuses to go to the doctor, and she cries. Nick says “Come on, boy! Come on, fella,” and a lump in his belly starts to move around. He talks to it. “Atta boy!”
Rollo calls Roger. He was reading Hobbes’s notes. Hobbes came up with a parasite that was a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease to turn the world into one big orgy. Annabelle was used as a Guinea pig, and she went berserk. He put the acid in her to burn up the special organs. Roger says that Hobbes was too late; Annabelle was really popular with some of the men in the building.
Betts decides to take a bath. The little penis-shaped parasite comes up out of the drain and crawls inside her with much screaming. Elsewhere, an old woman knocks down and drags a caterer into her apartment, “I’m hungry—hungry for LOVE!”
Roger talks to Nurse Forsythe, his girlfriend/assistant. She goes home and starts cooking dinner. There’s a knock at the door, and a man barges in and starts to rape her. She stabs him with a cooking fork. She catches Roger in the hallway, and he enters the apartment, looking for the man. He finds the bloody fork on the floor and takes a blood sample.
Things start getting out of control throughout the apartment building as parasites and infected horny people start roaming the hallways. Nick wants to make love with Janine, but she’s freaked out by his lumpy belly. One of the parasites crawls out of his mouth. She runs downstairs to Betts’s place, and Betts wants to make love to her—which goes badly for her.
Someone cuts the phone lines for the entire building. Roger tells the apartment manager to call the police, but the manager is already under the control of the parasites. Sex-crazed zombie people are now swarming the halls and breaking into peoples’ apartments.
Roger and his girlfriend try to leave the apartment but are attacked by a man who destroys their car. He thinks the police are on the way, so they just find a place to hide and wait. It doesn’t take long before he notices that she’s been infected. He knocks her out and ties a bandana over her mouth to keep the worm inside.
Meanwhile, Rollo comes to the building with some documents and looks for Roger. He’s surprised to find Roger’s office all torn up and ransacked. There’s no one around but Nick, who looks dead. Nick’s parasites attack Rollo, who pulls them off his face with a pipe wrench.
Roger runs from one group of infected people to another, encountering murder and mayhem all along the way. He eventually arrives in the big room with the pool and finds Betts and Janine in there. He goes outside finally and finds dozens of people who are already infected—it’s not just inside the building!
Roger runs back inside and is pulled into the pool as a hundred or so sex zombies break in. He’s eventually infected as dozens of people swarm around him.
Later, we see a whole caravan of cars driving out of the garage as all the residents disperse to infect other people in other places…
Commentary
Dr. Hobbes thought “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease to turn the world into one big orgy” was a great idea. Maybe not so much.
This was David Cronenberg’s first feature film. It became the most profitable Canadian film ever made at the time. It was also so controversial that Canada’s Parliament debated its social and artistic value and effect upon society. Did the government really want to finance this trash? It set off a whole debate over censorship issues.
It’s a bizarre film, very dated in the special effects, but it’s still a lot of fun.